"Never before was man so free from nature's restrictions, but never before was he more the victim of his own failure to develop in any fullness, his own specifically human traits. This extreme state of post-historic rationalism [may very likely] carry to a further degree the paradox already visible: "The more rationalized become the means of living - the more irrational will finally become the end product, man himself. In short, power and order, pushed to their final limit, lead to their self-destructive inversion: disorganization, violence, mental aberration, subjective chaos. This tendency is already expressed in America through the motion picture [and] television screens These forms of amusement are all increasingly committed to enactment of cold-blooded brutality and physical violence."
It certainly appears that, at present, the United States is unable to accept the reality that it cannot control the world. The more it tries, the more destruction, death and chaos ensue. This is what the term "deep politics" is all about.
Instead of creating a "world order" that works for the greatest number of people and the Earth, the U.S. keeps creating world disorder. World disorder reciprocally threatens domestic order as more and more of the U.S. wealth and basic human rights are drained off by military expenditures, ideologically-based removal of long-established domestic rights (e.g. habitus corpus) and maintaining a foreign empire.
(And, lest we forget, let us recall Benjamin Franklin's observation that: They who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little contemporary Safety deserves neither Liberty nor Safety).
The following occurred to astronaut Edgar Mitchell, while standing on the moon:
"Immediately after feeling a sense of identity with the planet as a whole, came the opposite feeling: that beneath that blue and white atmosphere was a growing chaos that the inhabitants of the planet were breeding among themselves - the population and technology were growing rapidly and out of control."
In the Global Brain Peter Russell states:
"Indeed, an aerial photograph of almost any large metropolis with its sprawling suburbs is very reminiscent of the way some cancers grow in the human body. Technological civilization really does look like a rampant malignant growth blindly devouring its own ancestral host in a selfish act of consumption. Our malignant behavior must be stopped. To bring this about we will need to change, in the most radical way, our attitudes towards ourselves, others, and the planet."
A disturbingly similar version of our predicament has been offered by Philip Slater in Earthwalk:
"The kind of growth Western culture has experienced over the past three hundred years would be considered a sign of gross malfunction in any other context. Healthy growth... does not absorb or destroy everything living around it. It is cancerous cells that grow and reproduce rapidly in total disregard of their connections with surrounding cells...
"[Additionally] there is a spiral effect that comes from the fact that our disease is continually being externalized. The more we create a diseased environment the more frantic we become in our efforts to escape it, and each motion in the service of escape carries us farther and farther from the state of health we seek."
Given the fact that scientists have now labeled our era "the 6th Extinction", it is not an exaggeration to put ourselves -- humanity -- on the endangered species list. Denial and an overall disorientation are still prevalent, even as many natural and human social systems appear to be rapidly approaching the breaking point.
It is apparent that, the current U.S. administration is feeding our insecurity - doing its best to evoke massive fear and regression in the world. Dropping out of the Iran and climate accords are just two examples. It appears already that choices need to be made between neo-fascism and deep democracy. Or shall we unconsciously give up... choosing ignorance and automatonism leading to the consequent decline and/or demise of the Earth's bio-community?
As Rollo May once observed - during times of radical transition, when the societal structures we've used as external guides begin to fall apart, and when all the familiar mooring places are gone, the full results of our bankruptcy of inner values begin to emerge. Erich Fromm also clearly argued that a common response is to turn inward, relying on authoritarianism or conformism.
A sense of paralysis often sets in. We can easily sink into indifference or a sadomasochistic stance, along with an increasing abdication of self-responsibility. Unconsciously, this form of desperation is a ripe field for the growth of authoritarianism, xenophobia, and scapegoating.
Rollo May:
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